A Day Off Poem

A pressed hospital gown
hangs
in
the closet
like a thin white ghost.

The generator
convulses
on its concrete
platform
one final time,
goes silent.

You learn after a while
to keep the shades
drawn
and not open up
the refrigerator.
To keep it all from escaping,
Or breaking in.

Days off
are like uncapped syringes
on the confirmed ward floor.

Outside the Kenyan nurse's
room
a man takes a machete
to the ochre chaparral.
It crinkles
then slouches.
No different in death than life.
For now anyway.

It could have been different.
It could have been seared,
leaving ashen stalks
on red earth,
the memory
of black plumes
rising
from the funeral pyres
that once incinerated
the virus
and all the cloistered dreams
from amygdala
to spleen
in a pit lined with stones
too large to be called gravel.

The smell of singed hair
is back to the smell of molten plastic.
The sun turns a pallid eye,
and has been confused for a hot moon.

Acronyms form and then scatter
in what few night clouds remain
in neither holy nor unholy trinities-

WHO.
NGO.
IMC.
CDC.
APB.
IMF.
CNN.
NFL.
MLK.
DNA.
PCR.
CPR.

And
RIP
written
in
dry
erase
red
on
our
whiteboard
in
the
white
medical
tent
next
to
a
name
given
three
years
ago